Posted by mandinka on October 4, 2004, at 18:41:51
Hi!
I'm new to this board but I've been reading your posts for some time. As I am in need of support and would also like to share my story as a cautionary tale, I decided to post. It's a long post so better get your favorite beverage and a comfy chair before proceeding...
I don't have much experience with psychotherapy. The last time I've been to a therapist was when I was 18 and that was many years ago. It didn't do anything for me. I decided to return to therapy now but unfortunately I received a serious blow right at the beginning.
I started regressive therapy with a man who is a specialist in his field. I was with him for two months. Things went pretty well. Even though sometimes I found his gestalt methods somewhat rough I held on, because my therapist had real depth and a big heart.
The last session before things fell apart he was laughing, he said I could tell him everything and informed me that whenever I wanted to, I could call him and he would call me back asap or right in the morning the next day - he knew I hesitated to call him and he was trying to coax me out of hiding. He was really pleased - we had a breakthrough that day and I felt happy for the first time since I don't remember when. The warmth coming from him was like a ray of light in my frozen internal life. He gave me hope.
Four days later he emailed me and left a message on my phone that because of health problems he had to terminate our relationship. This relationship was supposed to last several years and become a foundation for my reparenting and repatterning. I called him of course immediately - he was distant, brief and rather cold.
I cannot describe what a horrible blow the termination was to me. My therapist became the father I lost as a small girl, someone I looked up to (I was in a pretty regressed state with him). I was right in the middle of the symbiotic, merging phase. I had for T1 strong feelings typical of a baby bonding with a mother, a positive father transference and a negative transference stemming from another relationship in my life. The strength of those emotions scared me but he seemed okay with them. I had a very bad pre- and perinatal period which left me with terror, anxiety and mistrust of people. My history reinforced the theme of severe abandonement in my life. You can imagine what him leaving me meant to me.
He placed me promptly with another, female therapist also working in the regressive, reparenting mode - a very empathic and wise woman whom I really like but the blow I received is so severe that still after almost two months I am crying every day and just cannot pick myself up.
I had two more sessions with my old T (T1) but there was no closure, because the real issues were never addressed. He said nice things about me both to me and my new T (T2) but simply treated this time as a "cool down" period, not a time to have an in-depth discussion about the problems at hand. I didn't want to talk to him about how angry, betrayed and heartbroken I felt. He would have to be fully present and open for me to do just that and I intuitively knew he wasn't, even though I had no proof to validate these perceptions.
T2 and I agreed that the health story (T1 served her this story too) was a sham and the real reasons for my termination were different. I wrote T1 a letter in which I pointed out the incongruities between his behavior and words. Right after this letter, T2 confronted my old T and he admitted that the real issue was countertransference but he said nothing about its nature. He was - as T2 described him - "guarded and defensive". Our relationship had to blow out of the water for him something that blasted in his face with such force that he was incapable of working with me anymore (I doubt it was an erotic countertransference). He came up with the health story because he had no intention of sharing with me the real reasons for our split. I guess both his strong boundaries and sense of vulnerability made it impossible for him to talk to me about what was really going on with him, even though I asked him several times to open up to me. He just avoided the issue or gave me some trivial reasons for the termination. He's a good person - an opinion confirmed by other therapists that know him - but his own pain blinded him to the point where he couldn't see what I was going through and respond to me empathically. It's devastating that instead of trying to work through his issues and stick with me, knowing how dependant I was upon him at that moment, he headed for the hills instead.
I feel like I was being deprived of a profound connection with a profound person. A window of opportunity was shut down. I don't know when I will be able to open up emotionally to T2... I understand on an intellectual level that it is necessary but right now I'm too wounded to do that and I don't see the end to the aftermath of those events in the near future. A huge, damaging setback.
I looked recently for another therapist as I need more support and T2 lives too far away for me to see her more often than once a week. I don't drive, so I have to rely on my husband for transportation which complicates things. This man, when he heard I was terminated by T1 said that he had many patients coming to him from T1 and never heard any complaints. So now I have insult added to injury. Those who know T1 (and this is a small community) will immediately assume I'm a serious liability or a liar, because I cannot give the reasons for my termination.
This situation made me painfully aware of the inherent power and emotional imbalance in a therapeutical relationship. The client invests him or herself emotionally into someone who is only partly visible to them and available only in a prescribed amount of time for a given amount of money. It puts a client at such risk...
Question mainly for therapists: how often do situations like this occur for Ts - having such a blinding countertransference that the only option left for them is immediate termination? What sort of material can bring about such a strong reaction? T1 is not some second rate hack, who doesn't know how to handle his emotions and I know he has supervision from a very good therapist himself. That makes it all the more scary and unpredictable for me. How many of you clients went through sudden, premature termination without closure because of countertransference issues? How did you cope?
poster:mandinka
thread:398929
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20041002/msgs/398929.html